Politics.923

Michael Moore's latest film on American capitalism & democracy

I had minor problems with parts of the film, but all in all it was
great, and I really hope you all will see it soon. An old Roosevelt
speech from 1936, advocating a second bill of rights for Americans,
this one an economic bill of rights, put a kind of cap of crowning
glory on the film.

One of the things Moore points out is that the way to avoid a major
depression in this country would be to use tariffs to cut way back on
our imports and concentrate instead on bringing industry back to our
own country.

Another interesting thing he pointed out was that in Germany,
electrical energy production companies are required by law to
purchase, from consumers, any excess electricity that any of them
produce from their rooftop PV cell arrays, and to PAY THEM at the rate
of TEN TIMES the market rate for such electricity. This, of course,
gives large numbers of Germans an incentive to install PV cells on
their roofs and to use as little electricity as possible, instead
selling as much of it as they can, thereby eliminating the country's
need to burn a lot of coal to generate extra electricity.

In America, on the other hand, we simply burn enormous amounts of
coal, to get the piggishly huge amounts of electricity we need, and
then we bury the highly toxic coal ash underneath golf courses, or put
it into huge storage pools that eventually contaminate the water
supply, and/or we incorporate it into all manner of products from
bowling balls to rugs to roadways, from which products it will, when
they are eventually scrapped, pose major health risks for future
generations.